Vote up?

For users with an inferior browsers … yes. Other users (Firefox, Safari, Opera) won’t notice a single thing.

Inferior browsers are still the majority share. Majority. So, the majority notices your site as slow. The minority thinks it is awesome. This will change eventually (sooner than later), so why not build for the future starting now?

Slippery slope there. It isn’t that much work, and before you know it you’ll start cutting corners in other fields too. No matter how you look at it, you’re dropping the quality of your product.

No one has suggested offering an inferior product. That has never been the premise of these articles. Faster load times and more flexible design is a good thing. As newer browsers (think IE9) start offering the same things FF and Webkit do, more people experience the CSS3 bells and whistles.

As web professionals, we need to start accepting that all browsers are not going to display sites the same…that is likely to never happen, especially since CSS3 was created to allow for modular implementation. So why continue to try to make them all look exactly the same? Accept the differences, educate people on those differences, and move forward onto bigger and better things.

If that’s not the case, you should question the value of the rounded corners and whatever fancy css3 you’re adding.

If gradients, rounded corners and transparencies are critical elements of the design, then you have to throw more things at the inferior browsers, but you can do so while avoiding throwing those images, filters and Javascript at browsers that don’t require them.

The bigger the change, the messier your css will turn out. It’s extremely hard to maintain a good css using advanced selectors

#someIDhere {float: left;} changed to #someIDhere {float: right;} really doesn’t mess up your CSS at all. If you look at Meagan Fisher’s article from 12/24, you will see that the layout comps aren’t embellished with margins and padding at that stage. Once layout approval is given, then the additional embellishments are added to make it look less like a shell and more like a full design. And we are only doing it for ONE browser, the one being used to show these comps to the client, which would be a modern browser.

Finally, Andy’s Sam & Max design does in a way show the limitations of designing in a browser (even if he didn’t hint at it). Whether you like that sort of thing is a matter of taste, but I don’t really like to see the technical limitations/background in a design.

What limitation is that? If you are designing in Photoshop something that a browser cannot render at all, you are doing a disservice to your clients because it will never make it to the live site. No matter what tool you use to be creative, the browser can only do what the browser can do. The limits are there. Period.